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Monday, June 13, 2011

I know, I know. Really Dan, Twilight? But just like Harry Potter I finally had to see what all the hype was about. The first person who recommended the books to me was the nice lady cleaning my teeth at the dentist. It was my first time there and she was making small talk. I told her I liked to read. She got all excited and told me I had to read this book called Twilight. She seemed embarrassed that it was about vampires, which peaked my interest, but said that the story was so good she just couldn't put it down and was letting the dentist borrow them now. After that I started to hear about the books from other people. "You have to read the Twilight books, they're so good!" These comments were all from people I knew weren't avid readers, so I thought they must be good to get people who don't read often all excited. Then I started hearing the other side. All the bashing of "sparkly vampires" on podcasts I listened to. It seemed all the people who liked the genre fiction I did hated these Twilight books. They said they were awful. Well, I couldn't take it anymore. I had to find out for myself, so I read the first book. OK, on with the review.

OK, so it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, and it was worse than I thought it could be. Let me explain. The writing in this book is just bad. If I had a dollar for every adverb Stephanie Meyer used in this book, I just might be as rich as she is. Also, it seemed like she had a thesaurus and a cooking timer in her lap, and whenever the timer went off, she’d change the word she was on to one in the thesaurus just to make sure there were big words in her writing. It just didn’t match her voice in the rest of the prose to see these giant words dropped in out of nowhere. The plotting was bad too. Just when I thought it was finally getting good at the very end, the scene ends and you learn about what happened through dialogue. The climax of the book is relayed in conversations between characters after the fact. So yeah, the writing was atrocious, and the plotting was awful. That said, even though a lot of things bugged me as I read, it was a fun light read. I enjoyed the story despite all of the bad writing. I think Stephanie Meyer has some talent as a storyteller. The ending was pretty bad though. I guess I would wrap this up by saying I can see why people liked this book, and I can see why people hated it. I wouldn't say I hated it, it was a fun read, but it is horribly crafted and I would not consider it good literature. Let's just say I enjoyed the book, but I'm not going to be reading the second one. I just don't care that much what happens to these characters. What are your thoughts? Do you love Twilight? Do you hate it? Have you bashed on it without having read it yourself? Come on, fess up. Do you wonder why the Twilight books are so popular? I'd love to hear what you have to say.